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The Reverse Percolation Effect
Would people hold the views they do if they understood the first principles those views rest on? I suspect many would at least pause. Not necessarily abandon their position, but slow down long enough to ask what exactly they are affirming. This is not a universal pattern, but it shows up often enough in public discourse to be worth paying attention to. What I am describing is a kind of reverse…
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Abstraction and Non-Natural Concept Formation
The Abstracting Mind.—Bertrand Russell is said to have gone to see a film (his first) after having read Bergson’s critique of what he called the cinematographic representation of the world, which was Bergson’s response to the paradoxes of Zeno. Russell’s response to Bergson was that, “A cinematograph in which there are an infinite number of pictures, and in which there is never a next picture because an infinite number come between any two, will perfectly represent a continuous motion.” Both Bergson and Russell in their different ways were attempting to grasp the continuum. That they should do so by way of a discussion of a contemporary technology is revealing. Our technologies have given us glimpses of states-of-affairs that could never obtain in nature, as when running a film (or, now, a video recording) backward and so vicariously experiencing a reversal of time. This is no halting, hesitant view of a world that cannot be, but an apparently smoothly continuous representation of the impossible. It is not, in actual fact, smoothly continuous, but, given a frame rate that exceeds our ability to distinguish the images shown to us in sequence, not only are we unable to distinguish between the accounts of Russell and Bergson, we can’t even distinguish between 24 frames per second and an infinitude of frames per second. Even an artifact as simple as a photograph is unprecedented in nature, exemplifying what Ernst Jünger called our peculiarly cruel way of seeing; what we see is never an instant captured, but unbroken continuity, from which any individual image is an abstraction. Painting anticipated the captured instant before the advent of photography, and painting, too, is a human technology; the camera mechanizes the painter’s art, and in so doing gives us another kind of representation and another kind of abstraction. That the human mind can make sense of these unprecedented and unnatural representations of the world is testament to the high-wire act that is cognition. The abstracting mind, acting on sensory intuition, creates a world of its own, taking up its own novel abstractions in stride and running away with them.
The Epistemic Golden Mean of Concept Formation
Boundary Conditions of Abstraction.—The lessons to be learned from a methodological inquiry are not to be found in deriving a solution to a known problem, but in the struggle to find an adequate formalization of an elusive problem that will allow any solution whatever to be derived once the requisite epistemic resources are available. Surveying the problem reveals a range of constraints that bear upon it and a range of possibilities for it. These constraints and possibilities define an epistemic space within which our thought moves as we attempt to capture essential features of the world so as to serve as the foundation for a body of knowledge about the world, i.e., a science. For any essential feature of the world we want to capture in theory, there is a potential concept that is too abstract, and there is a potential concept that is too concrete. If we employ a concept that is too abstract, we become incapable of definitely delineating its properties or distinguishing it from closely related concepts. Our thought remains trapped within theory only, and has no bridge to the world. If we employ the concept that is too concrete, we get lost in the weeds. Or, to shift metaphors, we can’t see the forest for the trees. Our knowledge is too ideographic to generalize. Getting at the “just right” concept is the problem of the boundary conditions for abstraction, i.e., we are trying to find the “Goldilocks conditions” for knowledge. The entire enterprise of science is predicated upon our forming the right concept to capture the given problem. Concept formation occurs within the boundary conditions of abstraction, and the optimal concepts for the framing of knowledge will be the epistemic golden mean between the extremes of the abstract and the concrete.
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Heinrich Rickert and the Logical Concept of the Historical
Saturday 25 May 2024 is the 161st anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Rickert (25 May 1863 – 25 July 1936), who was born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) on this date in 1863.
Rickert built on the work of Windelband, formulating the idea of idiographical sciences in terms of the difference between concept formation in nature science and concept formation in history, which he pursued as a logical inquiry.
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1 Spring 2023 BOARD OF DIRECTORS Daniel Barreiros: Vice President | Brazil David Blanks: President | United States David Christian*: Emeritus | Australia Lowell Gustafson*: Treasurer | U.S. Priya Karve | India Andrey Korotayev | Russia Alexis Lau | Hong Kong David LePoire | United States Paul Nar...
Frontiers - Spring 2023
Many years ago I retrieved a book from a free book bin. It was Carl Hempel’s Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science. I was intrigued by the idea of concept formation, and the book has turned out to be an ongoing influence on my thought to the present day. Hempel’s monograph was squarely within the tradition of Anglo-American analytical philosophy, featured as Vol. II, No. 7 in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (IEUS), an ambitious but unfinished positivist project, closely associated with the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism.
I have since acquired several other monographs from the IEUS. In Vol. II, No. 1, Foundations of the Social Sciences by Otto Neurath, I found an anticipation of big history in which Neurath imagines, “all sciences as dovetailed to such a degree that we may regard them as parts of one science which deals with stars, Milky Ways, earth, plants, animals, human beings, forests, natural regions, tribes, and nations—in short, a comprehensive cosmic history.” (p. 9) However, the unity of science imagined by Neurath was reductive rather than emergent, being based upon the conceptual framework of early twentieth century positivism. There is a collection of papers, Otto Neurath and the Unity of Science, edited by Symons, Pombo, and Torres, focusing on just this difference between reductive and emergent conceptions of unified science.
Another monograph in the IEUS, Vol. II, No. 5, The Technique of Theory Construction by Joseph H. Woodger (who, in another work, The Axiomatic Method in Biology, has given a spectacularly reductive account of biology), includes this interesting aside: “The mere ordering of statements does not of itself create new information.” (p. 77)
While this is true, it ignores the fact that the ordering of information has a significant bearing upon emphasis and obviousness. The reductive unification of the sciences orders knowledge hierarchically, emphasizing the fundamental nature of physics in a material universe. An emergentist unification of science also orders knowledge hierarchically, but with the emphasis on the implicit possibilities that flower into later complexity. Both are true; each is complementary to the other; and each puts knowledge in a decidedly different light.
The logical empiricists, largely neglected today, are to be admired for the consistency and thoroughness with which they set about the reorganization of knowledge built from the bottom up by an explicit program of concept formation that built a common conceptual framework for the enterprise. Big history also seeks a thorough-going reorganization of knowledge on emergentist lines. Pulling back from the detail both of traditional history and of reductivist theories of knowledge, big history is a re-ordering of knowledge that places the facts of the world in light of the bigger picture—perhaps this is not new information, but it is a new perspective on information.
Big history would do well to study the history of concept formation, the better to understand the process of concept formation, and to pursue its own systematic effort at big history concept formation no less ambitious than that of the logical empiricists. There is much material upon which to draw. Years after I found Hempel’s monograph, I got a copy of Heinrich Rickert’s The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences. This work also systematically approaches concept formation, but Rickert belonged to those philosophers who thought that history requires a method distinct from that of the natural sciences, so his work is complementary to that of Hempel.
Once I started actively seeking out works on concept formation I also found Alfred Schutz’s 1954 paper “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences.” Schutz had attended a seminar held by Nagel and Hempel, and, impressed by their methods, sought to extend the analysis of concept formation to the social sciences, and within a phenomenological framework. Again, this places knowledge in another light, and constitutes another complementary effort from which big history can learn.
To Be Known
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The Effects Of Play Way Method Of Teaching And Concept Formation On The Learning Of English Language In Primary Schools In Uruan Local Government Area Of Akwa Ibom State
The Effects Of Play Way Method Of Teaching And Concept Formation On The Learning Of English Language In Primary Schools In Uruan Local Government Area Of Akwa Ibom State
THE EFFECTS OF PLAY WAY METHOD OF TEACHING AND CONCEPT FORMATION ON THE LEARNING OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN URUAN LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF AKWA IBOM STATE
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Introduction:
The study of the play way method of teaching and concept formation on the learning of English Language in Primary Schools…
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From the Reformation to the Third Reich: Protestantism’s Impact on Western Culture – Part 3
From the Reformation to the Third Reich: Protestantism’s Impact on Western Culture – Part 3
The following is part three of a multi-part series. Taken from John Immel’s third session at the 2014 Conference on Gospel Discernment and Spiritual Tyranny ~ Edited by Andy Young
Click here for part one Click here for part two
The Re-Discovery of Aristotle!
St. Thomas Aquinas
In the previos two posts I have brought you up to the collapse of civilization. That collapse lasts for almost 800…
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